DailyKaizen

I received a great e-mail message from Mark Graban, from the highly respected Lean Manufacturing Blog, where he said the following

I read your blog post… I think I got the gist of what you were saying…. why would you necessarily want “one piece flow” for ideas from people? You’re really saying “don’t tell us now, we’re at capacity??” That doesn’t seem right….I think your blog post either said, or I misinterpreted, that you were telling people to NOT make suggestions because the capacity wasn’t there.

The concern is well taken, especially after reading about all of this community’s commentary on LEAN implementations with varying degrees of philosophical adherence to the model.

To be a bit more disclosing, at one point in the conversation that I talked about, I did make that implication, and then immediately retracted my words because I realized it came out wrong. That says something about how easy it can be to drift to a disrespectful place (and also how we can never be perfect, but we can learn to recognize our imperfections more quickly…).

The experience we had before our transformation (which Lee documented in exquisite detail) informs our approach today. We used to accept suggestions in a very nice Web-based database, which would accumulate into the hundreds each year, along with side spreadsheets and worklists generated with each new request. At times it felt that we were spending more time managing lists than doing work. It seemed to me to be very disrespectful to say, “give us your ideas and maybe we’ll get to them.” This was the frustration that gnawed at me and caused me to seek out LEAN.

What I want to say is, “give us your ideas and watch us act on them with you.”

So the quest has gone from cataloguing ideas in an organized fashion to creating all the different environments where the ideas can be acted on. And this is where a dialogue about the best ways to get things done (one piece flow, leveling, etc) can begin. As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t do such a good job (in my opinion). The goal would be to create a feeling in the audience that is not what Mark was concerned about. And as you can tell, I didn’t do such a good job of creating the right feeling in the way I told the story, either!

One way we create different environments is to empower local experts to implement ideas on the spot, which we do. Another way is to rotate a team into the environment who can also take more complicated ideas an implement them on the spot, all the while demonstrating what it takes to make changes (e.g. “it’s more than a simple matter of programming”). Another way is to let everyone know where the team is rotated to and direct ideas to the local management there.

I hope this makes better sense. If it doesn’t, let the comments roll in, and feel free to suggest better ways to have the conversation…I am always open to improving my improvement techniques. And thanks, Mark, and others for listening and providing guidance.

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